Page 152 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22

That’s how it was for me with Sunday afternoon’s performance of
Schubert’s great song cycle Winterreise. Presented in the Dallas Opera’s
Titus Family Recital series, at Moody Performance Hall, German baritone
Benjamin Appl and British based pianist James Baillieu dug into the
doomed winter traveler’s very nerve endings. With a mix of blazing drama
and intimate half-lights they made the hourlong work a gripping emotional
experience

The 24 poems, by Schubert’s contemporary Wilhelm Müller, portray a
young man betrayed in love, wandering from one dispiriting scene to

another. Schubert, of course, is the most natural tunesmith, his vocal lines
alternately caressing, declaiming and recoiling from the words’ images and
emotional implications.

Near the end of his far too short life, already shadowed by illness, Schubert
is also the master of subtle but telling pianistic gestures. The opening
trudges set the traveler on his wintry way. Notes blown this way and that
evoke a weathervane, a metaphor for the traveler’s turbulent emotions.

Spare staccatos portray tears falling on ice. Sixteenth-notes triplets rustle
with a linden tree’s leaves. A postman’s jolly horn call sparks hope for a
letter that will not come. In the penultimate song, a strange vision of three
suns flirts at the edge of hallucination.

Finally, we hear the drone and repetitive twiddling of a hurdy-gurdy, its
pathetic player lost in his own world, ignored by all around him. Rarely
have so few notes made hopelessness so visceral.

I hear these songs as confidences, to be shared in a salon — as they would
have been in Schubert’s day. But Appl favored a highly dramatized
approach, clearly inspired by one of his mentors, the celebrated art song
interpreter Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.